youngs bay coffee shop

Youngs Bay Coffee Shop—Late Summer

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I am drinking excellent coffee in the Youngs Bay Coffee Shop. Yuban is dead.

Fog and smoke float through the shop. I keep thinking about the end of Oregon campfires. I want to write an essay about it. Or a tale.

It is early morning and summer wanes. I have nothing to do but wait for others. I grow weary of waiting.

Morning doves coo. I can see no birds.

The dandelions are curled up. A little more heat and they will release their yellow flowers. Then come the bees! I keep thinking about a short story where a man in a swank neighborhood mows around the dandelions in his lawn because he loves watching bees dance from flower to flower. And he wants to assist with the pollination of his world. His strange lawn draws the ire of the neighborhood lawn men and their rules for proper lawns. Tension ensues. Someone comes and mows his lawn when he goes out for groceries. The man is irate. More tension ensues.

The beach beckons. The latest installment of the fort message project has inspired some thoughtful, profane and hilarious writing.

I may have forgotten how to relax.

The big city burns up in heat and smoke and development.

I continue to downsize. There is little left that I own.

A distant reader wrote an extraordinary letter of appreciation thanking me for my books. He wants to read more. There will be more.

I wrote a letter to someone I haven’t seen or talked to in almost 25 years. I doubt the address is any good, but I felt compelled to try.

Youngs Bay Coffee Shop on a Summer Morning

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An overcast morning. Youngs Bay appears flat in the distance. I am drinking fine coffee from a fancy mug. I wonder if I write better under the influence of fine coffee instead of Yuban. I need to conduct a study.

A gull flies overhead. I hear traffic coming into town. The weekend has begun. There is no such thing as a weekend for me anymore.

The smell of the impending school year hangs in the air. I used to both relish and dread that smell. It’s no longer part of my life, but still, occasionally, I waft back into the classrooms and recall some of the memorable moments and memorable personalities. There were many.

Lots of chores today. One of them is moving the stock of my Nestucca Spit Press books to a new location. How many tons of these books have I moved over the years? It’s got to be an Oregon record of some kind.

I read the front page story of the NY Times and it was about a rich tech entrepreneur who apparently has gone insane. I think many people into tech or working in tech have gone insane or gravitated to sociopath status. I wonder how historians will compare the tech giants of today with the Robber Barons from yesteryear. To me, the current crop is ten times richer, more powerful, more insidious, infinitely cooler, and in league with The State to monitor and monetize everything about us. They also don’t build libraries in rural cities across the country. One wonders if there will ever be a huge cultural backlash against their power and ideology. It probably is too late to resist because how can you exist in the modern world without using even the most basic form of tech? We are intertwined and enslaved. I have to use the tech giants to post this blog and conduct communication with a potential employer. There just seems no getting around it unless you live off the grid, and I can’t, although I want to.

Maybe there is something to this writing on fine coffee!

Sun is threatening. I actually would prefer a good, tourist-disillusioning summer rain. It’s the only weapon left for the Oregon Coast.

After the chores, the beach beckons. Then a lengthy ass-to-chair session on a new editorial endeavor. Or I will bag the new editorial endeavor and begin a new literary endeavor. There is a difference.

Youngs Bay Coffee Shop

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I am sipping a fancy coffee from a backyard on a fine weekend morning. Youngs Bay barely moves in the background. Let’s call this place the Youngs Bay Coffee Shop. I like writing here, but not the ongoing coffee shop novel, which is a city novel, and I am not writing this from the city.

Tourists have descended upon the Oregon Coast. Doubtless another record year. It feels time for me to sell the house and leave. But where do I go? This question is consuming me. I have options, then I discover they’ve vanished.

Gulls, jays, crows, hummingbirds and doves fly around me. It is good to have coffee with them.

I think about some old friends who have recently returned to my life. I think back to all my coffee shop writing the last 33 years, even in Portland when Portland wasn’t a coffee town and not a single Starbucks was in Oregon. I think back to the people I met in coffee shops over the years. I used to love to visit the barista who later became my wife when she was working in downtown coffee shop. She was one of the Rose City’s original baristas and she mesmerized me with her beauty and grace behind the counter. She introduced me to good coffee, but I have since returned to Yuban and other cheap drip brands. I feel like I write better drinking cheap coffee, and even better when it’s leftover a day or two.

I am lucky to have Youngs Bay Coffee Shop. It has saved my soul more than once that past 18 months. Watching the actions of the intertidal is powerful medicine.

Is it too early or too late for morning brandy in the coffee? There is yard work to do later.

Here comes another customer, a great friend. He sits down next to me. His little speckled dog joins us, too. My friend and I begin to talk and the dog wants in on the conversation.

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